Well if Purism had to delay the Librem 5 because the hardware part is not quite ready yet (still with that silicium problem) I would be a bit sad to have to wait a bit more but I prefer to have something that stick to what is planed than something that was rushed because of the time limit.

I agree with both comments above. My only desire is for some transparency in status. Most of us have been waiting quite a while for the device and would have no issue waiting a bit longer. It could be the company is truly behind and does not want to come out and say they are delayed a second time. The job of their Project/Program Manager cannot be fun. That being said, we are all like school children on Christmas…waiting for Santa…lol.

Also notable is that they can’t afford to do the same rush with the phone as they did with the dev-kit (where the LCD panel still doesn’t work 2 months after shipping without special HW to configure it).

Knowing Purism and how transparent they usually are I would be very surprised if they did delay the phone without telling us, I think that for now the state of things is that they don’t know (due to Chinese new year) if they will need to delay or not but in the meaning time they stick to what was planed.
Don’t take my word for it as I’m just assuming things here.

I don’t think I would be the only person who would have a problem with Purism making regular posts of “no significant changes have occurred since the last update.” It would just condition us to ignore new posts from them because interesting information would be so widely spaced out. I also take their relative silence to mean that they’re hard at work trying to get everything ready for the phone’s release, and that’s where I want their efforts to be right now because getting that ready is more important (to me) than reading about what’s done so far and what’s left.

With their current rate of updating the “news” page I would anticipate the next update to happen the week of the 18th. This is not a guarantee, but it matches with the roughly every 2 weeks that they’ve been providing updates recently.

Please understand, we all are approximately 2.5 months away. When you have a roll out of this magnitude, it s not a problem with routine posts from Pursim that coincide with the issues they also manage. No one said it have to be every month on a Tuesday, during a full moon, at 930PM EST. What is being said is we are all anxiously waiting and we all are willing to accept some minor delay. It goes back to effective communication.

February is the Chinese New Year and effectively the entire country is shut down for that month. Therefore, we can only restart the production ramp-up process in March, with first units to be produced in April.

What shoud a news post at this point give us? “Guess what happened: no progress with our hardware partners in China, as unexpectedly they don’t respond to our mails.”
Also, that is nothing to put in a blog post, because it does not make a good impression on those that don’t know the background. (That’s also part of effective communication).
It could be communicated to the backers via email. But then that could create rumors.
So, I’d be okay if the next update comes in march, and then it has actual content.

Two more notes:

That quote already leaves room for interpretation that the phone production could begin end of April, and thus shipping would be in May.

Even if they anticipate further delay, it would not be the smartest to hint at that right now, during a time they hardly get Chinese feedback. In march they have a much better chance to give fact-based estimates. Also, announcing a delay is nothing they want to do on a regular basis. If they have to do it, they’ll want to make sure it will be exactly one more time (again, part of effective communication).

Thanks for the direct and precise question. Those two issues are still being investigated, at least as far as I am aware.

There will probably be a more general update in the coming week, summarizing general progress - I’m running late with that at the moment. I expect a more specific response to those errata issues will be published in its own update. That is unless I run very late with the current update.